People are dumb; there’s nothing new about that. Public ignorance about depression in particular was on display recently in a news article I came across, and it annoyed me, so I thought I’d write about it. First, let’s start with some background. The news related to the findings of an article published last month in …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is moral typecasting. Moral typecasting is a concept first described in a 2009 paper by psychologists Kurt Grey and Daniel Wegner. Not everyone agrees that it’s actually a thing, but it’s an interesting idea. It involves casting people …
Guns kill people, and sometimes they kill a bunch of people in one go, as happened in the recent grocery store shooting in Buffalo, New York, and the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Thoughts and prayers, yada yada yada, but what can be done to actually reduce gun violence? This post focuses on youth gun …
This was originally going to be a book review of The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. However, at 800 pages, it’s a serious commitment, and I only made it partway through. Still, he had me convinced, and I wanted to share my thoughts on what I did get through. In the book, …
A couple of months ago, I came across a blog post that mentioned Glennon Doyle. I didn’t know what that was, so off I went to Google. It turns out she’s a feminist author, and I stumbled across a 2016 blog post of hers titled Quit Hating Her. The chatter in the comments fascinated me, …
Collective Illusions by Todd Rose explores the creation and maintenance of social lies that are fuelled by false assumptions, conformity, silence, and a lack of questioning. Drawing on social psychology and neuroscience, this book shows just how skewed these norms can be from the reality of what most people actually think. Collective illusions occur when …
The incel (a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate”) phenomenon, at least in its present incarnation, has emerged in the last decade and a bit. It’s come into the public eye through acts of violence committed by the likes of Elliot Rodger (in 2014 in Isla Vista, California) and Alek Minassian (in 2018 in Toronto, Ontario). Misogyny, …
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This week, we deviate from the mental health theme to look at Born A Crime, a memoir by Trevor Noah. I’ve been a fan of Trevor Noah for a while now. I regularly watch his late night show, The Daily Show, and I like his comedy specials on Netflix. Race and cultural differences often come …
I think online privacy is a bit of a myth, in that most of us don’t have much. So I’m curious, how important is it for you to try to maintain some modicum of privacy in the online world? I recently came across a blog that was using Hu-manity.co for data privacy management. When I …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we have two beliefs that conflict, or when our beliefs and actions don’t match, making us feel uncomfortable. The concept was originally described back in the 1950s by psychologist Leon Festinger. …
